Ninety individuals or teams from around the world, split into three age groups, qualified for the competition. For the July 23 event, judges chose 15 finalist projects by 21 students based on their multimedia presentations. Kim and the judging panel chose one winning project from each of the age groups.

The winner in the 17- to 18-year-old age group and Grand Prize winner, Brittany Wenger from Lakewood Ranch, Fla., developed a cloud-based neural network program that gave a 99.11 percent accurate diagnosis of breast biopsies using a minimally invasive method.

Kim said she was also impressed by the winning projects in the other two age groups. One focused on improving the music experience for the hearing-impaired using tactile sound, sound transferred by touch. The other found microscopic life in fresh water.

The judging panel also awarded a "Science in Action" prize to a team from Swaziland that evaluated hydroponics as a way to solve food problems in southern Africa.

“I talked to every single competitor,” Kim said. “Most of these students learned their electronic, mechanical and computing skills via the Internet, not their teachers, which was a big culture shock for me.”

Kim became involved in the judging process through CERN, which also contributed a judge. One of the prizes available to the Grand Prize winner is a visit to Fermilab, followed by a trip with a CMS physicist to the Large Hadron Collider. Other prize choices came from event sponsors Google and LEGO.

Kim suggested to Google Director of Education Maggie Johnson that the finalist students and judges form a network so the students could keep in touch and receive advice in the future.

“These students are much more advanced than I was at their age,” she said. “I am eager to help them as much as I can.”

—Joseph Piergrossi

Special Announcement

Ask-a-Scientist lecture on the Higgs boson - July 29

On Sunday, July 29, at 1 p.m., the public is invited to attend a free lecture in Wilson Hall by Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln titled "The Higgs Boson. What is it? Has it been discovered?" The lecture is part of the laboratory's Ask-a-Scientist lecture series.

Following the talk, Fermilab scientists will be available to answer questions about the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and particle physics.

Visitors will also be able to access the 15th floor of Wilson Hall, including its science exhibits and view of the laboratory site and surrounding area.

In the News

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer claims huge cosmic ray haul

From BBC News, July 25, 2012

The largest-ever experiment in space has reported the collection of some 18 billion "cosmic ray" events that may help unravel the Universe's mysteries.

The data haul is far greater than the total number of cosmic rays recorded in a full century of looking to date.

The astronauts who installed it on the space station in 2011 are in Geneva to see an update on how it is performing.

Mission commander Mark Kelly told reporters that AMS was "the pinnacle of the science that the ISS will do".

The huge number of events seen by the experiment includes some of the highest-energy particles from the cosmos that we have ever seen.

Collision? Interaction? Event? What's that all about?

Interaction? Collision? Event? Physicists use many words to describe what you are seeing here. Today's column helps sort out those confusing terms.

Read the expanded column on the differences between collision, interaction, beam crossing and event.

Those of you who follow high-energy physics may often hear scientists casually toss around words that all seem to mean the same thing – interaction, collision, beam crossing or event. If you get confused when you hear a physicist talk about these things it's because…well, I have to admit…we can use them in confusing and inconsistent ways. Usually an expert can pick up on what is meant by context, but it can easily set a non-expert's mind a-spinning.

Let's start with the word interaction. Interaction means kind of what it sounds like: Two particles interact with each other or somehow affect one another. Sometimes, the interaction might change the particle's identity, as when a quark and antiquark come into contact, annihilate and turn into a Z boson, which then decays into an electron and positron. Or they might change each other's direction or rip each other apart. So an interaction occurs when two subatomic particles somehow "mess" with one another and change each other's identity, trajectory or energy.

A collision is an interaction in which the particles approach each other with some velocity. In a generic interaction, two particles could just be sitting at rest next to one another (although this essentially never happens in collider physics). In a collision, we need to somehow shoot one or both at the other.

Shooting particle beams at one another at the Tevatron or the Large Hadron Collider isn't like two fire hoses aimed at one another – it isn't a continuous stream of particles. Rather, the beam is separated into what we call bunches. They can be visualized as little sticks of spaghetti. Each stick is separated from others by some distance, and each stick contains on the order of a trillion particles.

In order to have a collision, you need to have two bunches traveling in opposite directions and timed exactly to pass through a detector at the same time. If they do, a collision could occur. A beam crossing refers to the moment in which bunches of beams are simultaneously in the center of a detector.

At the Large Hadron Collider, a single beam crossing often gives rise to twenty simultaneous collisions. Most of them aren't worth looking at, and the detector isn't programmed to record them all. But once in a while, one of those collisions might be the signature of something interesting, so the detector records the passage of all particles made by collisions in that particular beam crossing. We call this an event. An event is made of at least one interesting collision or interaction and an indeterminate number of simultaneous uninteresting ones. For some events, the collision of interest is of such a high energy that it totally dominates what the detector sees.

That's it. Just don't expect any physicist you speak with to be so precise with their language. We almost certainly will use terms interchangeably and you have to winnow out the exact meaning by context. Or, I suppose, by reminding us to be careful.